Question

I want to specify the team capacity per user and per activity on TFS’12 Scrum Template 2.0, which may differ on every day on the sprint.

As described in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee191595.aspx I can set capacity per day of a person, like 7 hours for a sprint of 5 days.

How can I specify a capacity like the one below?

• Day 1 : 7 hours
• Day 2 : 5 hours
• Day 3 : 9 hours
• Day 4 : 3 hours
• Day 5 : 6 hours

Thanks.

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, the TFS capacity planning doesn’t support this. You can use the “Days off” to block off entire days, but not parts of a day.

That being said, the capacity planning is used to try to know how much work is assigned to an individual or team and whether you have enough capacity left to address the work remaining. For the majority of your sprint, an average will work. For risk-averse managers, you may want to put in the minimum amount and just use the additional hours as bonus that is not part of the capacity.

In your specific example, however, if your individual is averaged to 6 hours a day, you’ll get a capacity that starts hurting you at the end of your iteration. It will look like you have 12 hours left for Day 4 and 5, but really you only have 9 hours.

If you use the minimum approach, you’ll average at 3 hours a days and look like the capacity is full part way through Day 3 if you assign tasks that fill up their actual hours.

This is one of the reasons that you should be trying to get a consistent availability from your team, and not just having an hour here or there being added to the sprint. 100% allocation, ideally, as you’ll read about on most anything written on scrum/agile teams.

In the end, also, you need to ask yourself what you are going to use the capacity numbers for. That will dictate whether this is the right tool for what you need to accomplish, and also what approach you can take.